The Best Laptops for College Students

For students, a laptop is as important as textbooks or a school ID. It’s not just meant for educational purposes, but also for extracurricular activities such as social networking, watching movies, listening to music, posting photos, gaming, text/ voice/ video chatting and so on. When it comes to choosing the best laptops for students, you should make sure that it serves them both academically and amusedly.

Here in this article, we discuss various characteristics that you need to consider to be sure that the laptop you have bought will last long, and is compatible in educational areas.

Operating System

The first thing to check is the operating system. To tackle the software incompatibility issues, windows-based laptops seem to be a smart idea. It also offers a user friendly interface, making it easy for students to carry on with their works. Although, you may choose from OS X and Linux platform as well, windows based laptops are the most popular in general.

Keep it Light

A big screen may not be such a good idea. It’s great to have big screens for your home but when it comes to campus life; it’s a real drag to carry a big screen laptop while running from class to class. You’ll need something light. Usually, 13 or 14 inch widescreen is ideal, as it will minimize your weight burden.

Essays, research papers, and chatting online with your class mates will take most of your computing time. You’ll need a laptop with full-size keyboard and comfortable touchpad though. With laptops below 13 inch, you will not get the same typing experience.

Standard Features are enough

Even the cheapest laptops come with features that you would find in an expensive one. There are enough USB ports on most laptops nowadays. This will help you expand your storage capacity, if your internal hard drive isn’t enough. Most laptops come with 320 GB storage nowadays. Expanding to a 500GB or 1TB is not that expensive too.

Cheaper features like VGA is still used to present PowerPoint slides on big screen. Technologies like Display port and HDMI are better equipped to stream high quality videos. Many cheaper notebooks and laptops have built-in HDMI ports that you can use to play high quality videos.

A webcam and media card reader is already an integral part of most laptops. There’s not much of a problem too. So don’t always think that only expensive laptops have greater features. Cheaper ones might just be the best too.

Battery Life

A good sized battery can be your greatest friend in a day full of classes and extracurricular activities. It is always better to buy an additional battery. The battery with more “cells”, the better will be the battery life. A heavy battery might be worth it, if you want to run your laptop for the whole day without charging.

Think of Warranties

Almost every laptop comes with at least 1 year warranty on parts and labor. Extended warranties are also available. The standard warranty doesn’t cover accidents from drops and so on. So, choose and understand warranties provided by the company wisely.